Immersion by Ted Conover

Author:Ted Conover [Conover, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226113234
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

But it’s the ethical dilemmas he creates with his reporting, and how unflinchingly he confronts them, that are particularly illuminating.

Soon afterwards, explaining that carnal romance between Jewish women and Arab men is fairly common, he decides that he should try to have an affair. At a club he meets Miri. “She had completed a degree in literature and she took odd jobs for a living. In English peppered with Arabic, I told her about the Balata refugee camp, where I supposedly came from.” Miri takes the bait and things progress. “The lie that was in the making left me with some doubts. It was not that I had never sought out romantic ties on the basis of motives that were less than totally pure, such as the desire to find a partner for a one-night stand. In that case, though, such a desire was presumably shared by the partner. But I had never taken advantage of a woman in a cold and calculating fashion.”

In bed, talking about their pasts, Binur learns that Miri’s military service entailed being present during the interrogation of Palestinian women by the Shin Bet. Hearing these stories, “I felt a little like Mata Hari must have felt when she extracted information from the statesmen whom she entertained in her bed. It was mainly a sensation of power, knowing that I was able to use intimacy of the occasion for purposes which were unknown to my partner.”

But clearly also it was a sensation of shame, because after the experience Binur goes on a several-day binge of drinking at home, apparently in an effort to manage his disarray. These binges are a repeating trope in the book: “For several weeks after leaving the kibbutz, I spent most of my time back in Jerusalem, lying around in an inebriated state. I was doing a poor job of relaxing; my recent experiences kept coming back to me, disrupting my peace of mind.”

His countrymen’s attitudes toward Palestinians, and Israel’s role in their oppression, are part of what upsets him, but another part clearly is the psychic cost of his serial deceptions. The last one recounted in the book involves his sitting down with an important Palestinian political leader in a refugee camp in Gaza. Upon later learning of the deception, the man responds, “You have done a very ugly deed. How could you drink coffee in my home and dine at my table and lie to me at the same time?”

The social boundaries that Binur aimed to transgress in his project are potent indeed. I like My Enemy, Myself because of its boldness, its surprises (it does not follow the usual narrative of Israeli-Palestinian strife), and the author’s candor: Binur shares much that lets the reader understand his process, even the parts that don’t reflect well on him.

Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man recounts an 18-month experiment in which the author, who is lesbian, passed as a man, mostly among men: on a bowling team, as a live-in visitor to a monastery, in a strip club, going door-to-door with a sales team, and as part of a self-therapy circle.

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